GameCyte

GameCyte gets all buddy-buddy with Far Cry 2’s narrative designer. Who knew an free-roaming FPS could tell such tales?

When we got our hands on a playable build of Far Cry 2 at E3 2008, we were immediately impressed by the game’s immersive atmosphere. Not just graphics; things like the near-complete lack of HUD, the intense weapon recoil, the believable damage to persons and structures and the pull-that-bullet-out-of-your-big-toe health regeneration system had us playing more conservatively than we might otherwise. But over the course of our short demo, lead level designer Jonathan Morin told us about one more — the game’s so-called “buddy system.”

At first, we didn’t quite understand what Morin was going on about. Buddies were NPCs you could befriend (eh); buddies would give you your mission objectives (yawn); and buddies would — spectacularly — save your rear from rather extensive perforation by dragging it to nearby cover (hmmm). But when Morin told us that these buddies would also feature into the game’s plot, we perked up our ears.

Games like Portal and BioShock have recently proven that even first-person shooters can tell impressive stories, but these games are typically quite linear — with only one path for the player to tread, you’ve more or less got a captive audience for the journey that follows. But Far Cry 2 boasts 50 square kilometers of African jungle for players to traverse at their leisure. How could a game that big, and that open, possibly tell a convincing tale? Morin couldn’t say, but there was someone else in the room eminently qualified to assist — the game’s dedicated narrative designer, Patrick Redding.

GameCyte: So, we just finished speaking with [lead level designer] Jonathan Morin and he tells us you’re the one to talk to about Far Cry 2’s buddy system. Would you mind telling us a bit about how these buddies work, and how they tie into the story?

Patrick Redding: Sure. There are twelve buddies; nine of them are male buddies and it’s out of those that you pick your avatar, your player character. The concept is that right from the very start, in a sense the first decision you make when you start a new game, is ultimately going to alter slightly the way the story assembles itself.

A lot of times we talk about the fact that we have what we call a dynamically assembled narrative, which is to say that, yes, there are missions, and the missions kind of line up different parts of the game world so the player can go there and do things and then have certain consequences, but the fact is that it’s basically totally non-linear. We’re sort of assembling the story out of those pieces in response to what the player is doing.

GameCyte: How do you make that happen? You’ve got a certain character you’ve chosen. Do you start out with a bit of his story already internalized?

PR: We tell a bare minimum of the character’s background at the very start, because for us, the game isn’t about playing a role. Like, I’m not going to pick Frank Bilders and here’s his bio, and it’s like I’m Sam Fisher, and I’ve got his voice in my head and all that.

As a first-person game, with so much emphasis on immersion, we really want the player to be kind of pouring his own brain and his own consciousness into this role.

GameCyte: So Player One is you, and then you’ve got your primary and secondary buddies…

PR: Primary and secondary buddies – we use that term, but those are emergent outcomes of the buddy system. The way the buddy system works is I unlock buddies basically by saving them. They’re in some kind of predicament, and either I’m told that there’s somebody in trouble that I should go help, or I just – through exploration – encounter these guys. And by saving them, I meet these guys that are basically like me.

It makes sense, because obviously I could have been playing them. They’re kind of these free agents, they have their own agenda, they function autonomously in the world once they’re unlocked. And the idea is that when they initially meet me, we have very little history, they don’t know who I am. They don’t know if they can trust me, and I don’t know if I can trust them. But I did save them, so they kind of owe me.

What happens is, we have a number of expat-bar type locations where the buddies hang out, and when I go in there they’ll be like, “Oh, hey, I know this guy,” and they’ll start talking to me and the idea is that at least initially they’ll talk to me about these little side quests that I can do for them, and it’s just a way to get to know a bit of their back-story and kind of decide whether I actually like these guys, or whether I don’t like them.

GameCyte: So they’ve got their own reason for being there.

PR: Exactly, and we’ve always said we’d rather have the player hate a buddy than feel ‘eh’ about them. Because ideally, some of them they’re really going to like, and some of them they’re probably going to despise…

GameCyte: Why would you want to help out these people? What’s in it for you as the player?

PR: That’s exactly it. The way we view it is this: the only plot we impose on the player is what we refer to as the ‘Heart of Darkness plot,’ in the sense that I’m here to track down the Jackal, this mysterious figure who’s been harming both factions in this conflict. The actual dynamics of how I drive that are what we call the ‘Yojimbo dynamic’ – I’m entering town as the lone gunman and there’s two warring factions who are too gutless to really fight it out to the end, and so they’re kind of willing to use me as an asset to make that happen. The reason why I want to help these factions is not only because they’re paying me in diamonds which I can use to get weapons – and which increase my reputation and infamy – but also because it helps me get intelligence on the Jackal and where I can find him.

Now, part of what makes me infamous – part of what drives that forward and accelerates it – is subverting the intentions of the factions. When they give me a mission, they’ll just say “Listen, we need you to get rid of the propaganda radio station and I don’t want to send my own men to do it because they’d just get into all sorts of trouble, so I want you to go do it,” and so I go to do that, and I get a phone call from Frank –who has earned enough history points with me now that he’s at the top of my stack – Frank calls me up and says “I heard you’re blowing up this radio station… Maybe you should come talk to me. I know something about this.” And so I go up and see Frank, and Frank says “Listen, it just so happens that this and this and this is going on; if you would be willing to do X, before you blow that radio station up, it will kind of unleash a chain of events that will help you, and definitely further the cause and create more damage to the faction that you’re attacking, but it’ll also push further than was originally intended.

GameCyte: Will you know that going in, or will you find out after making the decision?

PR: He explains at least a portion of that to you, and the way we set it up it’s scalable. The player can say “Yeah… I don’t really want to know all this stuff up front, I just want to know what my objectives are,” and so the player who’s really just focused on getting through the critical path, he can just sit there and say “Yep, okay, sounds good, go.” But the guy who’s really interested in that story and really wants to observe that narrative and understand why his actions alter the political landscape, he can sit there and probe for more information, and get it. We’re really trying to make this a very self-regulating system, so the players are taking or leaving as much or as little as they want.

A guy like Frank, in order to be a primary buddy, has to have earned a certain amount of history with you.

GameCyte: Are we going to be seeing these history points somewhere, or…

PR: We won’t have a pop-up that says “Ta-Twing! 3 More History Points,” it’s not a DS game — No offense to anybody, I love DS — but it is there in the pause menu. You can look at the list of buddies you’ve unlocked, and on the basic objective screen we always show who your primary buddy is, if you have one, who your secondary buddy is, if you have one, and the player doesn’t get to move these things around by literally dragging and dropping – the only way to alter that history is through interaction and through gameplay.

GameCyte: Are you worried that players might game the system and artificially say “I’m going to do X with Frank in order to boost him up there,” just because I want to see more of his story?

PR: Oh, we want them to do that. What you’re describing is something you could do in real life. You could be like, “Oh, I like Frank, and I want Frank’s agenda to be the one that wins out, so I’m going to do everything I can to support him – I’m going to save him if he falls in battle, I’m going to get him to help me, eventually I’ll do side quests for him, eventually I’ll push him to the point where he’s the guy I’m working with.

But the thing is, every time I take one of these subverted objectives on at his suggestion, in the end I will be placing his life in some kind of jeopardy, and I’ll have to go and back him up – and if I fail to do that, or if I simply neglect to do that, then he’s gone. He’s out of the picture.

GameCyte: So is the narrative then one you create by interacting with these people? Or are you also unlocking some of their back story, and learning more about where they’re from and what they’re about?

PR: I don’t differentiate between those two things, because as far as I’m concerned, what we didn’t want to have was just a bunch of embedded narrative in the form of journal entries that the player picks up as collectibles – although we do have some content like that, and good reasons for having it in the situations where we do have it.

GameCyte: What form will that come in?

PR: Well, for example, in the case of the Jackal, because he’s a mysterious figure, and we need to keep him in a somewhat privileged position so the player doesn’t kill him off in the opening ten minutes of the game — honestly, we struggled with whether or not we might be able to pull that off, just let the player kill the villain in the first ten minutes and actually have the game be about something completely different – we wanted him to have a presence in the game world but we needed to control that a little bit. It makes sense that he wouldn’t stick his neck out too much, because he knows that people are gunning for him, and this craziness that he’s up to works better if he pushes buttons and kind of get people to do his dirty work for him.

GameCyte: And you find some of his leftovers?

PR: What happens is literally in the very beginning of the game – and actually, we have a blog that we’ve been using to support the game by this character Reuben Oluwagembi — he’s this journalist, an African journalist who is covering the conflict, and he’s kind of like our moral barometer.

He’s the everyman, who represents the normal human perspective on a conflict like this, and he basically meets you and tells you “I’m doing an expose on the Jackal – I’m exposing this foreign arms dealer who profits off the misery of my fellow Africans – and I’m going to expose him and I’m going to expose the warlords and expose the people who get their guns through him.” It’s a dangerous job, but he wants to do it.

Reuben had at one point actually found the Jackal, like at a hotel bar, and got him to open up. The Jackal’s just drinking himself to death, and he’s like “Yeah, you want to know why I do what I do? I’ll tell you why I do what I do,” and so Reuben conducted taped interviews with him. These tapes at some point got seized and confiscated by the troops, and got scattered, and so the player is actually able to find these as collectibles. It’s a little game-y, it’s a little bit RPG, but we wanted to give the player an interesting collectible that you could seek out, and it’s a little bit of embedded narrative a la BioShock that you’re able to access.

At the end of the day, it’s not really interesting to have a villain who’s just there to be villainous; it’s important for the players to make that ‘player’s journey,’ going up the river into the mind of a madman. It’s kind of a metaphorical journey, and we need to give the player some sense of progression there. “Now I know why the Jackal is the way he is, and why he’s doing what he’s doing.”

GameCyte: Once you get there, what’s left? Is there a moral decision whether or not to get rid of this guy?

PR: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

GameCyte: Is there anything afterwards?

Following that moral decision? Well, we show you what the consequences are often like in situations like these. We’re not trying to preach to the player – “You know, the world would be a much better place if we could just kill all the evil people” – that’s not the message of the game. The message of the game is that often, decisions to do the right thing happen hand-in-hand with decisions to do something in the short term that might be pretty terrible, and we’re not saying that that’s a good thing, we’re not saying there aren’t other alternatives, but what we want to do is get the player to confront that, and acknowledge the fact that it’s complicated.

We don’t want to do that by preaching to the player – it’s still a shooter – but I think one of the things we realize is that first-person shooters are a great vehicle, again, for being a little subversive, because no one goes into that experience expecting to have that kind of narrative. If I buy an RPG… if I buy an action-adventure title, something like Assassin’s Creed even, that has a very extensive history attached to it and a lot of interesting philosophical ideas kind of tied into it…

GC: (smiles) Good plug.

PR: It’s — Well, yeah. But truthfully, they’re doing some things that I think are really impressive, but it is that kind of game – it’s a game that I’d expect to find that [complicated narrative] in. It’s not that we’re lowering the bar for ourselves, but we are kind of allowing ourselves to experiment with procedural narrative and dynamically assembled narrative in a situation where it can be a relatively simple implementation.

GameCyte: Could you give me an anecdote demonstrating how this procedural narrative all ties together?

PR: Sure. There’s definitely a high-level component as well as a low-level component to that. The high-level component would be like what I described earlier — I take a mission for one of the factions. They know the UFLL [United Front for Liberation and Labor] is broadcasting propaganda; they’ve discovered where their mobile transmitter is; they want you to take it out.

At that point I get a call from my primary buddy, who might Frank or Flora or somebody, who says “Listen, it just so happens that the same faction, the UFLL that has this transmitter, they’ve got this guy, this corrupt health official/foreign aid worker guy who they’re parading around and I’m actually driving him – I’m his chauffeur. I’ve taken this job because that guy’s a total scumbag. Here’s what I think you should do. I know you’re going to destroy the antenna, but before you do that, find the guy, some distance away, who’s got his finger on the kill switch of that antenna – the guy who’s sitting there listening to the broadcast, has the ten-second delay and decides “Uh-oh, I can’t let them say that,” and hits the switch – kill that guy. Once he’s dead, there’ll be no one to edit what goes out. When you go to the antenna, before blowing it up, force the DJ to read a message over the radio. The message on the radio will direct all forces in the area to converge on this motorcade I’m driving, to attack it and to kill the guy inside it.” So you’re subverting the use of the radio, doing something really horrible with it, in order to take out this other target.

There’s three components to it: you’re altering the landscape first, then going to the base objective, and then you have to do the follow-up – when they attack the car, the buddy is going to be in big, big trouble because he’s the one driving it, and you have to come to his rescue and make sure he doesn’t die in the process.

And that story’s very different from the one where I just blew up the antenna.

GameCyte: How do your actions here affect things later on?

PR: In doing that subvert, I get additional benefits in terms of the amount of diamonds I get in that mission, plus I get benefits in terms of increased infamy. The next time I walk into a mission briefing, maybe my infamy has now crossed from being primarily low to primarily high – the reactions and the attitudes that I’m getting from the guys in that room are now totally different. In fact, eventually I’ll reach a point where my infamy hits a threshold, and it affectively ends that phase of the story and we enter a new phase.

The other way it’s dynamic is that at a lower level, rather than having a big branching dialogue tree, what we’ve done is created buckets of what I call micro-narrative. I can say that a typical conversation or a typical briefing consists of a piece of dialogue about X, a piece of dialogue about Y, a piece of dialogue about Z, and those are all drawn from bucket A, bucket B, bucket C and bucket D, each of which is parameterized in some fashion. This bucket will vary always by infamy; this bucket will vary always by how far I am in the mission progression; this bucket by how the two factions are doing relative to each other.

That content can just be pulled and assembled, so that maybe only one piece of information in there is totally specific to that discussion, and therefore will only ever be heard once – that eliminates this kind of phenomenon that you get in branching narrative where a single player only ever hears 10% of the content and the rest is just gone, unless he goes back and replays it. In our case, most of it is reusable, and maybe 20% of it is not. It gives us some economy, but it also makes the player feel like “Yeah, I’m not just playing a Choose Your Own Adventure novel,I’m actually working my way through a world that is able to respond dynamically to what I accomplish and what I do.”

GameCyte: What kind of feedback are you going to get based on your actions in the game world?

PR: So — infamy being the best example of that — again, there’s high, medium and low-level types of feedback.

For example, I start the game sick with malaria. My only source of malaria medicine is the civilians in the world, who I help mainly by getting them forged travel documents that they can use to get out, or protecting them from being wiped out by the militia, and when I do that they reward me with malarial pills. And I need to do that, because when I start out I’m very, very sick and I need to get those symptoms under control.

At the same time, there are low level advantages to being very, very infamous. If I drive my infamy up when I’m in combat, I have a higher statistical likelihood of putting guys into health failure. That means when I shoot a guy, instead of just killing him outright he will drop to the ground and lie there, and groan and scream, which among other things attracts friends to come out and try to help him – which then allows me to hit his friends. It becomes a mechanical reflection of how much of a bastard I’m being.

So there are advantages to being infamous. It makes me more powerful. If you think of the two main arcs of my power as a character, aside from obviously my weapon selection, there’s my infamy and my health – health being the limiter of how much damage I can take. What’s interesting is that at some point, my infamy can get so high that the civilians will stop being willing to give me medicine for my malaria, at which point my health begins to deteriorate. As so my infamy increases, I become largely reliant on that infamy to do the job of making me a tough son of a bitch.

GameCyte: I’m almost wondering if your journalist friend will start covering you instead…

PR: ’smiles’ Exactly. It does become an issue, and in conversations with him he alludes to it.

Among other things, when I mentioned that buddies could be lost in battle if I don’t come to their aid, there are a number of possible outcomes to that. They could be spawned in the world, we could have our little adventure together, they could be fighting side by side with me and I could save them, or they could get into a situation where they’re wounded and they’re beyond my ability to help them – and I end up having to literally give them injections until they die, to euthanize them because they don’t want to be captured alive by the enemy. In other situations I might say “I can’t do it,” and I walk away, and the guy’s like “What are you doing, you can’t leave me here to be taken,” and I just can’t bring myself to take responsibility for that. In each of those cases, the next time I run into a buddy and have a conversation with them about whatever it is we’re doing, whether a mission briefing or what have you, they’ll mention this. They’ll be like “I heard what happened with Frank. That sucks, man.” And depending on how much responsibility I took, they’ll have a sense that maybe I was being more or less… trustworthy in terms of how I dealt with them.

GameCyte: Can you… alienate yourself from these buddies?

PR: Not 100%. We didn’t want to… well, I can’t actually answer that question without giving away an important point of the story… Yes. The answer is yes. It does happen systemically to a certain extent, but it’s also something that you really have to work at.

GameCyte: (grins)

PR: Let’s put it this way: if you’re being very, very careful and very considerate of your buddies, then by the end of the game you will have done a very good job of not alienating them. And if you have been reckless in how you deal with your buddies, or even (chuckles) homicidal in how you deal with buddies – because you can kill them, you can say “Hey, I like that gun,” BLAM, take the gun – then there will be consequences.

GameCyte: What happens if you get rid of them all? Does the game lose something for that?

PR: It does, to an extent. There are always a certain number of these guys floating around, but they tend to be the ones that you maybe haven’t dealt with a ton, because they’re not implicated in the game as often [as those you have history with]. If you simply don’t have any more, then that frankly closes off a whole bunch of content. They will not be there to give you these subversive objectives. They will not be there to save you when you fall in battle, so you will have to reload all the way back to your previous save point. They won’t be there to give you the side quests that you can do to help build your history.

There are absolutely consequences, and it will limit the type of experiences that you’re going to have if you don’t interact with the buddies. But some players are going to be fine with that.

GameCyte: Do you have to focus on one of these buddies to get the most out of them, or can you have a bunch of different…

PR: I think the system right now lends itself to the player having, at any given time, anywhere from three to five buddies active; of whom he probably will probably naturally gravitate towards those he has an affinity for and kind of push them into that primary role, but the others will all be there and if guys get killed in battle – which they’re more likely to do if they’re implicated in gameplay – then the others will be able to step into that role. But yes, I expect that a player will be maintaining a stable of roughly four to five of them at a time, and a typical player will have at least three.

GameCyte: Last question: what difficulties did you have making this narrative system work in Far Cry 2?

PR: ‘chuckles’ Well, we’re still having lots of difficulties making it work. Debugging it, frankly, is a nightmare. But the main issue is just the sheer complexity of having multiple interacting systems that are all theoretically capable of feeding into or helping to determine which content you’re pulling at any one time. We really had to develop, from scratch, a notion about what it is to assemble story content, and then at the same time we had to recognize that if we did our job correctly, probably the majority of players won’t even realize which parts of the experience are story and which parts are gameplay.

We can tell them what the plot is – we can say “Oh, you are here to kill the Jackal, that is your mission, you’re working with the factions; go nuts!” and that’s pretty much all we’re able to say about it. But the other side of that is that we are trying to completely integrate narrative into the game. We are trying to make them the same thing. We don’t want to just have embedded story or pinch the player’s experience off at key points and show them a cutscene; so that means the story is more subtle, more systemic, because it doesn’t feel like something that’s being told to me – it feels like something that I’m doing.

It often will not feel like a story at all. And we’re okay with that. If we’ve done our job properly the player will be talking about this crazy experience that they had, and if someone says “What about the story,” they’ll be “I dunno, there really isn’t that much of a story,” but what they’ll have is this incredible set of experiences that unfold in a totally systemic way.

GameCyte: Sounds wonderful to me. Thank you for your time – this was a pleasure.

Liked what Far Cry’s narrative designer had to say? Don’t mind being thrown smack into the middle of an ongoing industry conversation about the future of game narrative?

Then head on over to Gamasutra, where there are seven more pages of Patrick Redding’s thoughts awaiting your eyeballs… or check out the PowerPoint slides for Redding’s GDC 2008 presentation, “Do, Don’t Show: Narrative Design in Far Cry 2.”

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